The insults heaped on Hull are so ingrained they seem part of its architecture. "From Hell, Hull and Halifax, good Lord deliver us," pleaded a 17th-century verse that helped colour Britain's view of the city for the next four centuries.

These days, when Hull enters the national consciousness, it is usually as a totem of social deprivation. Few places can match it in the misery stakes. At any one time 51 people are chasing each job vacancy in a port city whose buildings were devastated by the Luftwaffe and whose trawling industry was destroyed by the cod wars of the 70s.

Today almost two-fifths of the population have no qualifications. Only 20% of the city's inhabitants patronise the arts. The melancholy poetry of its secular patron saint, Philip Larkin, seems to ooze from the banks of the Humber.

But the view that Hull is on its uppers is, its defenders believe, lazy and unfair. And now Hull has had enough. In a move that is likely to see trawlerloads of sarcasm sent up to Humberside, the town that on Saturday saw its football team promoted to the Premier League is bidding to become the UK's 2017 city of culture.

It faces serious competition. Dundee, Leicester, Aberdeen, Plymouth and East Kent are rolling out slick, celebrity-backed campaigns. East Kent has Orlando Bloom. Aberdeen has Billy Connolly and Emeli Sandé.

Of course, Hull could roll out its own big guns. Tracey Thorn of Everything But the Girl went to the city's university, where the former poet laureate Andrew Motion once taught English. Norman Cook and Paul Heaton formed the Housemartins in Hull.

Maureen Lipman and Tom Courtenay were born in the city. But Hull favours a more sober approach. Having failed to win the 2013 city of culture bid (it went to Derry), phlegmatic Hull is talking up how success this time around would help it overcome centuries of prejudice. As its extensive bid document explains, Hull wants to "come out of the shadows and re-establish its reputation as a gateway that welcomes the world".

Hull is certainly a gateway. More than a million people pass through its port each year, but most quickly move on. Those who linger, however, see a different side. Rupert Creed, a playwright from Brighton, came to Hull when he studied at the university in 1974. He has never left. Hull, he argues, has always been a creative city, a place prepared to try new things. "There's this blank canvas, this willingness to make things happen."

A successful bid, Creed believes, would help redress the chronic regional imbalance that has seen arts cash funnelled to Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester but left Hull a Cinderella city of the north. "If the equivalent was happening to health funding, there would have been a public outcry," he added.

It would also give a major fillip to the city's 10-year plan to deliver 7,500 new jobs, something that Steven Bayes, a Labour councillor, believes would be a "tipping point" for Hull, as most of the positions would be created in the service sector and require little training. "We don't want to create jobs that are so hi-tech, so high-skilled, that we end up having to import the workforce," he said.

The risk for Hull and its rivals, though, is that arts-based regeneration programmes often fail to deliver on their glittering promises. Last week it was revealed that Derry may have to cut its cultural programme because of a shortfall in ticket sales and sponsorship. And few remember Sheffield's £15m museum, the National Centre for Popular Music, which closed in 2000 barely a year after opening.

But Hull's arts scene appears to resolutely obey the "build it and they will come" model. The recent Warhol, Hockney and Da Vinci exhibitions at the Ferens gallery drew record crowds. The Hull Truck theatre's pint, a pie and a play nights are popular. Its Freedom festival, a free concert celebrating the city's most famous son, the abolitionist William Wilberforce, is attended by tens of thousands of people. In the once disused warehouses of the city's Fruit Market district, close to the dockside, bars, clubs, galleries, delis and micro-breweries are appearing. The area has the look and feel of east London's now fashionable Shoreditch 20 years ago, although its inhabitants bridle at comparisons with the capital.

"We could never do the things we are doing in London, because of the overheads," said Mark Wigan, a former photographer for ID magazine who runs the Museum of Club Culture art gallery. "Here it's about having the time and space to try things. In London it's about jumping on trends. Here there's real depth."

Despite this, the city remains largely in the shadows. "There are 300 bands in Hull," said Mikey Scott, who runs a recording studio, Fruit Trade Music. "It's ridiculous that no one knows this."

Two events, however, will soon place Hull firmly on Britain's cultural map. This autumn Slipstream, an astonishing 70m-long, 77-tonne work by the acclaimed sculptor Richard Wilson, will be installed in Heathrow's Terminal 2. The sculpture is being constructed by a Hull company, CSI Fabrication, and Wilson has insisted that a plaque bearing the legend "made in Hull" is fixed to the work, which will be viewed by more than 20 million people a year.

And later this month a £7m, 15m-long movable pedestrian bridge over the river Hull opens. It is like no other bridge in Britain. When moving to allow ships to pass, it plays the sound of chimes and birdsong as coloured lights flash.

With work on the bridge running late, the project is viewed by some as having parallels with Hull's quest to become the UK's city of culture: a costly act of hubris. But others invest it with deep significance. In the bridge they see something that connects Hull to the banks of the Humber, the North Sea, Europe and beyond. As Mark Babych, the newly installed artistic director of the Truck theatre, put it: "People say to me that Hull is at the end of the line; I say it's at the beginning."

Incidentally, Everything But the Girl got their name from a junk shop on the city's Beverley Road. It's a chamber of commerce now.